Max Stirner (1806–1856)

Formerly known as Johann Kaspar Schmidt, German philosopher and writer; representative of the Young Hegelians; bourgeois individualist and anarchist thinker.

Stirner was born on October 25, 1806, in Bayreuth, Bavaria, Germany. In 1826, Stirner enrolled at the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Berlin to study philosophy and theology, and during that time, he listened to Hegel as well as Protestant theologians such as Schleiermacher and Marheineke. From 1828 to 1829, he studied at the University of Erlangen, then dropped out and returned to the University of Berlin in 1832. He graduated in 1835 and failed to pass his thesis, On School Rules failed to pass. Later, Stirner worked as a probationary teacher in a secondary school and a teacher in a secondary school for girls.

In 1842, he began to have dealings with the Young Hegelians, and later became an important member of the Young Hegelians. During his participation in the activities of Young Hegelians, Stirner wrote reviews and correspondences for the Rheinische Zeitung, Leipziger Allgemeine Zeitung, Berlin Monthly and other publications, mainly criticizing the Prussian authorities and Church, and criticizing the censorship of books and newspapers. In October 1845, Stirner published his representative work, Der Einzige und sein Eigentum (The Ego and Its Own). Based on subjective idealism and egoism, this book held that men are egoists, and that egoism is the essence of self-consciousness, the trend and truth of historical development. He advocated that “I” (the individual) was the “Ego” (der Einzige) in the world, the core and master of all things, that anything other than the “Ego”, including the state, God, law, morality, truth, etc., was non-real and illusory and should be discarded. From the standpoint of individual egoism, Stirner resolutely opposed the proletarian revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat, emphasized the absolute freedom of the individual, rejected all states, governments, organizations, and disciplines, and called upon “the real egoists and the unique one to unite”. In The German Ideology, The Communist Manifesto and other works, Marx and Engels criticized and liquidated Stirner’s viewpoint of subjective idealism, egoism and anarchism. In 1852, Stirner published an anthology entitled History of Reaction, which likewise upheld the viewpoint of subjective idealism and egoism. Stirner died in Berlin on June 26, 1856.